MakerBot receives $10m in funding

MakerBot has some big news: 

Today, I’m excited to announce that MakerBot is taking $10 million in investment, with Foundry Group leading the round. 

(Via Boing Boing)

3D printed plane lowers cost, build time, complexity while increasing performance

3D printers don't just make funny shaped D&D dice. They're revolutionizing rapid design and manufacturing. According to New Scientist, a team from the University of Southampton has designed and built a fully functional UAV in one week and on a 5000-pound budget:

"With 3D printing we can go back to pure forms and explore the mathematics of airflow without being forced to put in straight lines to keep costs down," says Keane.

So Keane's team set out to see how quickly they could design a 1.5-metre-wingspan, super-low-drag UAV, print it and get it airborne. A UK-based 3D-printing firm, 3T RPD of Greenham Common, Berkshire, joined the venture, agreeing to print the UAV out of hard nylon.

"We designed in printable hinges that would let the ailerons move," says 3T RPD spokesman Stuart Offer. "And we decided where to split the fuselage so the nose could be snap-jointed to the fuselage easily."

It'll be a while though before you can go on holiday on a printed airplane.

White paper on the disruptive nature of 3D printing: It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up

Just as the Gutenberg press changed the way written language was created and distributed, and eventually revolutionized society; just as the internet turned media distribution upside down; so could 3D printing start a revolution in manufacturing. However, as has been the case with the previous examples (Catholic Church, record and movie companies), key players have vested interests in keeping things as they were.

The white paper below "examines how intellectual property (IP) law impacts the rapidly maturing technology of 3D printing, and how incumbents who feel threatened by its growth might try to use IP law to stop it."

Very interesting!

It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology

(via BoingBoing)

Random things you can make with a 3D printer, Part 1: rubber band-powered gearbox

Endless fun with the awesome energy storage potential of rubber bands!

From Make Magazine (via Boing Boing)

Lego printer made from... Lego

I (day)dreamt of this thing a couple of weeks ago-- I guess I'm not the only one. And they make a point about self-replication that I hadn't thought of: a Lego-based 3D-printer, although much less true to the idea of self-replication than a "real" 3D-printer, is much easier to replicate than, say, a RepRap...

From Wired:

Watch out, humans: An invasion of self-replicating Lego robots could be at hand.

Software engineer by day, Lego maniac by night Will Gorman has created the MakerLegoBot, a machine that can take a virtual 3-D model and assemble it using Lego bricks.

The machine is itself built entirely out of the Lego system, which raises the possibility — theoretically at least — that the machine could, with some modifications, build a copy of itself. The 3-D assembler uses three Lego Mindstorms NXT Bricks, along with 9 NXT motors.

“There is a recursiveness to this whole thing,” says Gorman.

“I love the idea of self-assembly and the Star Trek replicator and I love Legos,” he says. “I wanted to bring those two worlds together.

The MakerLegoBot is a tribute to the emerging trend of 3-D printers and self-replicating machines such as MakerBot and RepRap.

(Via Slashdot)

Foam printer makes floating foam shapes

I watched in awe as wondered, "why haven't I thought of this before?"



(Via Boing Boing)

Classic cars for the masses: you don't need to be Jay Leno to own a Bugatti

Classic cars for the masses. Here's Jay Leno describing how he reproduces hard-to-get parts for his classic cars by using a 3D scanner and printer. By extension, you might one day be able to own a (cloned) Bugatti on a budget, by just 3D-printing a design downloaded from the internet.

 

One of the hardships of owning an old car is rebuilding rare parts when there are simply no replacements available. My 1907 White Steamer has a feedwater heater, a part that bolts onto the cylinders. It's made of aluminum, and over the 100-plus years it's been in use, the metal has become so porous you can see steam and oil seeping through. I thought we could just weld it up. But it's badly impregnated with oil and can't be repaired. If we tried, the metal would just come apart.

So, rather than have a machinist try to copy the heater and then build it, we decided to redesign the original using our NextEngine 3D scanner and Dimension 3D printer. These incredible devices allow you to make the form you need to create almost any part. The scanner can measure about 50,000 points per second at a density of 160,000 dots per inch (dpi) to create a highly detailed digital model. The 3D printer makes an exact copy of a part in plastic, which we then send out to create a mold. Some machines can even make a replacement part in cobalt-chrome with the direct laser sintering process. Just feed a plastic wire--for a steel part you use metal wire--into the appropriate laser cutter.